Woman School at Vintage Theatre Collective | Theater review

The only way to ensure a wife’s fidelity is to marry an ignorant woman. Arnolphe (Adam Soule) believes this so heartily he’s started a school for the express purpose of keeping his future bride Agnes (Kelley Ristow) moronic, with two drunken, horny housemaids teaching her their extensive knowledge of sexual positions and Katy Perry lyrics.

Vintage’s take on Molière’s bawdy comedy L’École des Femmes has a Sean Graney–lite quality: Characters interact with the audience before the show, the costumes are youthful and modern (aside from the horrendous wigs), and the language is similar to that of the source material but throws in the occasional curse word to score a laugh. Eric Powell Holm’s new adaptation mostly retains the original’s rhyming structure, and the ensemble does its best work when it uses the musicality and rhythm of the language to push the story.

Katy Carolina Collins’s overly aggressive direction becomes apparent before the show begins. During the awkward and unnecessary preshow bit, Caitlin Costello and Emily Shain force dialogue with the audience as they dance around the room for 15 minutes. The pair takes its servant characters’ raucous, Three Stooges–like clowning so far over the top that they become abrasive, detracting from Holm’s language; the sluggish execution of the physical comedy diminishes its impact. Holm has crafted a fine adaptation. Collins needs to trust that the words are enough.